| Project Detail |
Creating low-impact concentrated solar energy
Adding renewable energy sources helps fight climate change and reducing the cost and improving the efficiency of solar power is one way to do this. The EU-funded HYBRIDplus project will pioneer the next generation of concentrated solar power systems, providing greater energy storage capacity and increased dispatchability with lower environmental impacts. Utilising phase change material technology and integrating recycled metal wool, researchers will convert concentrated solar energy into stored thermal energy utilising a new high-temperature supercritical CO2 cycle, providing abundant energy ready for use. This ground-breaking approach will provide high volume, efficient and accessible energy without environmental drawbacks.
HYBRIDplus:Advanced HYBRID solar plant with PCM storage solutions in sCO2 cycles. HYBRIDplus aims to pioneer the next generation of CSP with an advanced innovative high-density and high-temperature thermal energy storage (TES) system capable of providing a high degree of dispatchability at low cost and with much lower environmental burden than the State of the Art. This thermal storage is based in the Phase Change Material (PCM) technology in a cascade configuration that can reproduce the effect of a thermocline and integrates recycled metal wool in its nucleus that provide hybridization possibilities by acting as an electric heater transforming non-dispatchable renewable electricity such as PV into thermal stored energy ready to be dispatched when needed. HYBRIDplus proposes a novel approach to concentrated solar power with a PV+Cascade PCM-TES CSP configuration based on a high temperature supercritical CO2 cycle working at 600 ºC. This new plant is called to form the backbone of the coming energy system thanks to a higher efficiency and lower LCoE than state-of-the-art technology, and in addition to other benefits such as full dispatchability reached with the hybridization in the storage that allow higher shares of variable output renewables in the energy system and environmental friendliness (lower CO2 emissions, minimum water consumption, enhancement life cycle impact). |
